Romance: JADEN: An MMA Fighter Romance (Bad Boy Tattoo Romance) (New Adult Pregnancy Short Stories) (18 page)

Bastian flicked on the light, and the dust smell that seemed to come with all garages hit me. I resisted the urge to cough and moved over to one of the shelves that lined the walls of the garage.

“We should probably just take all the boxes down and we can go through them after breakfast,” I said. “Mom can come help us so that we don’t throw away anything important.”

Bastian didn’t respond, but I heard the scrape of cardboard a moment later. I rolled my eyes. If I didn’t know any better, he was pouting.

We worked in silence for a long while. It wasn’t the companionable kind of silence I would have been feeling if it were Mom out here helping take boxes down. It was tense, as if someone had a piece of wire stretched taut over a knife. There was only so long before it would break and we would be at each other’s’ throats.

It happened much more quickly than I thought it would. I was moving a box off of the edge of the top shelf to the left of Mom’s old Saturn and Randy’s sophisticated Porsche, when the sudden weight caught me off guard, and I stumbled back.

I hit something hard—god was he that ripped?—and then strong, corded arms that one only achieved at the gym wrapped around me. I felt a shock go down my body, and I stiffened. His arms were gone by that point I had managed to comprehend what was happening.

Bastian was warm enough that I felt my body chilling once again. I took a deep breath in and let it out on a huff. “Thanks,” I snapped, setting the box down. I glanced around. Bastian was maneuvering a box to the side of the garage as if nothing had happened. He glanced up at me, blue eyes practically glowing in the thin light.

“Be careful,” he responded. I rolled my eyes at his snappy tone.

“I don’t need you to look after me. I’m fine on my own, thank you very much,” I said after a few moments.

“Very capable.” His tone was so full of mocking that I could honestly believe that he outmatched me in my level or sarcasm. If only for this Moment, because I wouldn’t relinquish my title as Queen of Sarcasm that easily.

I glanced back to see him giving me that infuriating grin that I wanted to smack off of his face. “I am,” I said, “ninety-nine percent of the time. You’re lucky you caught me in the one percent of failure. It’s a once in a blue thing you’ll never see again if you’re going to be living in this house.”

The grin faded from Bastian’s face, replaced by a glower. I found that I kind of wanted the grin back. At least I could have a good reason to gripe at him if he had that idiotic grin on his face. I sighed and turned around again.

“Your mother will most likely move into Randy’s mansion.”

“Randy, is it?”

There wasn’t a response, and I realized I must have hit a sore spot. “Were you consulted about this marriage?” I asked quietly, turning to lean against the empty shelf after setting a much lighter box beside the heavy one.

I caught myself watching Bastian’s arm muscles ripple as he slid another box off of the top shelf. He was wearing a short sleeved black t-shirt that was tight around his chest but didn’t quite hug his abs. Which I knew full well were there and very prominent, having just felt them against my back. Who the hell wears a short sleeved t-shirt while shoveling snow? I thought with annoyance.

He glanced around at me after a moment and then dusted his hands on his jeans that probably cost him an absurd amount of money.

“No, I was not. But it isn’t as if I’m still part of the family or anything. I have my own house, my own money, my own responsibilities,” he said smoothly. “I honestly don’t care who my father marries.”

“And your mother?” I felt nosy asking, but hey, I was going to have to see him during all of my holidays and probably much more than needed.

He looked up at me, eyes narrowed as if he were debating whether or not to tell me. “Divorced him a long time ago. She found out that he was banging her secretary and took off the Moment she secured a few million from his trust fund for me.”

“What a bitch,” I said without thinking. I didn’t take it back when I realized how harsh my words were, however. Those are the kinds of things you can’t take back no matter how much apologizing you do.

Bastian didn’t explode on me like I had expected. He simply inclined his head and took a few steps closer. I tensed warily, wondering if he was planning to shove me into the wall and hide my body somewhere remote or not.

My fears were needless; he simply rested beside me. “That’s the day I learned to not depend on anyone else for money.”

Wow. This asshole actually had a touching backstory. I had heard of those billionaires in books where they had come from nothing, yada, yada, and had been betrayed by someone they trusted, but I had never actually seen it in real life. Ever. “Wow,” I said out loud, not elaborating.

“Not the dick you thought I was?”

“Every inch of it, but hey, you do get some sympathies from the ladies, I expect.”

Bastian snorted. “You think like a man.”

“I think like one to escape them all.”

Bastian looked down at me, his gaze unreadable. “You’ve dealt with our kind before?” He laughed at his own phrasing God, I feel like some sort of scientist. I meant a rich person.”

“He wasn’t rich, but he had the ego and tendencies of a rich man. Ever heard the phrase beer money champagne tastes? Fit this idiot to the tee,” I said offhandedly, trying to cover any true feeling I may have still had about Eric.

Bastian looked over at me and didn’t look away. I could feel his gaze on me and I felt uncomfortable suddenly, standing there next to him with his gaze searching my very soul. It didn’t even matter that I was standing there in only my dad’s old shirt. It didn’t matter that I could feel the kiss of cool air against everything but my torso. I could be wound from head to toe and still feel as naked as I did in that moment before him.

For the first time, even though he had just told me what his past had been, I felt as if he was something more than just a spoiled little brat who took his father’s money and made his own money. I saw something in him that I don’t even think he meant me to see.

It scared me because I was already falling for his good looks and snarky attitude (though I would never say this aloud if asked). What would I do if I found out that he was actually a good person? I looked away from his stare and turned to move another box off of the shelf.

“Isabelle,” Bastian said softly. I jerked at the lack of snark in his tone. He had a pretty nice voice, I had to admit. Again, never out loud. I would suffer the pain of death before telling Bastian Nicholson that I thought that he had a nice anything. “No one should treat a woman like you like that.”

“A woman like me?” I asked, bracing myself for the worst.

“Someone with integrity and an identity that makes her stand out from the crowd.”

I frowned. This was weird, coming from Bastian. He was known for dating airheads who had most likely been cheerleaders in high school for all of ninety seconds before dumping them and moving onto the next conquest. What did he know of integrity and an identity that was different than everyone else? “Well, I do try,” I said, turning before he could see the puzzled look on my face.

He followed me, annoying bastard. “You think I don’t understand,” he said with revelation in his voice. “Because of my… history.”

“Well you have left a legacy,” I said cheekily. Bastian snorted and leaned his forearm against the rail that held the shelves I was leaning up against up. The space suddenly became much more cramped as I found that the movement brought him mere inches from me.

“I don’t think you understand my reason of doing that.”

“I understand perfectly,” I said. I rolled my eyes. That cocky grin was back in place and gone were any deeper qualities I had seen in him. Even though I now knew that they were there, I found that they were completely overshadowed by the impossibility of me understanding how he could be so narcissistic.

“You are so quick with your words,” he said. It was more of a murmur because of our proximity, and his tone made it just as intimate. I felt a shiver trace its way down my spine and told myself to snap out of it, to move, to do anything to let him know that he was not welcome and that he would not be getting a piece of this ass if I had something to say about it.

My body didn’t budge. I opened my mouth to ask Bastian to step away, that it was making me uncomfortable, and that we were going to be stepsiblings, for Christ sakes. Nothing came out, and I just stared at his eyes, which were even more delicious up close, blue upon blue upon blue, and my mouth hanging open like a complete and total idiot.

I didn’t even attempt to stop him when his lips slanted across mine, blisteringly hot and delicious in only the forbidden way. I didn’t twitch a muscle to get myself away. I wrapped my fingers around his biceps and pulled him closer, deepening the kiss. His tongue ran across my lower lip, finger fisting in my hair, and I felt another shiver go down my spine. I’d been kissed before, of course, but I had never been kissed like this. I let him in, and his tongue stroked mine in a way that was so utterly dirty and hot that I was instantly wet.

I let out a noise that I would be ashamed of much later and pulled him closer, rubbing my hips against his denim-clad ones, trying to get some friction. His other hand had slid around my waist, fingers just brushing the edge of my panties where the shirt had ridden up, and I felt him tracing the edge tantalizingly.

I have never been one for kinks of any kind, but damn, this turned me on more than anything else had in my entire life. The fact that we were practically dry humping each other in the garage of our very-soon-wedded parents held a kind of forbidden fruit that paired up just right with the way Bastian was biting my neck. He took his time, trailing his teeth down the tendon in my neck and sucking on my collarbone. I slid my hands under the sleeves of his shirt, feeling the fever-hot, smooth skin over supple muscle that twitched and flexed as he moved his arms.

I bit my lip to hold back a noise as his nose slid aside the partially buttoned shirt and skidded along the swell of my breast. I could feel him now, hard and ready against my thighs and I couldn’t help but breathe,

“Thank god, finally.”

He glanced up at me, his lips twitching upwards in a slight smile before recapturing my own again and ravishing them. I moved my hands to feel his washboard abs, knuckles bumping along the obscenely defined muscles.

“My god, how often do you go to the gym?” I asked breathlessly, breaking away from his mouth to look down at his stomach. The skin there was just as tanned as everywhere else, and I felt a shiver go down my body again, thinking about what he would look like in one of those sexy little Speedos that men sometimes wear to the beach.

“Every day,” he responded, and his voice sounded almost lazy with desire. It was slow as honey and just as sweet. This man could make love to me just with his voice, and I would be content.

But not right now. Right now, I needed him inside of me, pounding me deep and hard so that I would feel it the next day and the day after that. I slipped my fingers to the button of his jeans and flicked it open.

“Do you really want to do this in the garage?” he asked, panting hot breaths of air against my shoulder with each breath he released. He had rested his head against my neck, watching me take his pants off.

“I don’t see anything wrong with it, if you’re not scared of spiders,” I said breathlessly. Of course, I wasn’t really thinking. I didn’t have a condom, and unless Mr. Playboy carried them around in his pockets, we couldn’t do anything much more than what we were doing.

I suppose that it was a good thing that the moment I palmed his long, hard length and he arched against me, letting out a hiss of breath that resolved into my name a moment later that Mom knocked on the door.

“Breakfast is ready,” she said cheerfully, crashing me back into reality in a moment.

“We’ll—” my voice was hardly my own. I cleared it and shoved Bastian off of me. “We’ll be a moment.”

I didn’t look at him as I straightened my shirt and ran a hand through my hair. There were probably indentations of the shelves on my back made of dust, but there wasn’t anything I could do to get those off aside from taking the shirt off and shaking it, and I wasn’t about to do that.

“That was…” I began, but Bastian interrupted me.

“Meaningless? Nothing special?” he asked smoothly. Something in my chest tightened, but I didn’t flinch.

“A mistake. And wrong,” I shot back. I walked away.

A cold, hard reality check hit me straight in the chest as I walked to the door. I had almost just fucked my stepbrother. In the garage with my Mom and his dad just feet away, able to hear every small sound that came from our mouths. Yeah, not such a great idea.

What the hell was wrong with me? I took a plate from the counter and ignored Randy’s searching look at my swollen lips and flushed cheeks. “Thanks for breakfast, Mom,” I said. Our extracurricular activities had made me voracious, and I stacked half a dozen pancakes on my plate and gave them all a generous amount of syrup. By the time I was done with that, Bastian still wasn’t in.

“He wanted to pull the last few boxes down,” I said after a moment, as I realized that Randy was still looking at me. “He went and told me to come inside and eat and that he’d join us in a few minutes.”